On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Martin Husemann wrote:

> Since the FreeBSD thread and the opendesktop.org website left me completely

freedesktop.org

> clueless, maybe you can explain what this is all about? Why would someone
> want to replace a small subset of shared libs from XFree? I could understand
> imediately why I would want to replace X server code for security reasons,
> but only some libs?

One explanation, I copied into the wip/libX11/DESCR:
...
 The goals of this project are (1) to get libX11 out of the huge XF86
 hunk of code, (2) to make it buildable with autotools, (3) keep the
 ability to easily merge bug fixes from libX11 in XF86 into this code,
 (4) make it possible for people to work with Xlib without having to deal
 with the entire XFree86 distribution, so that bugs can get detected and
 fixed, and (5) provide a place to move the X library forward.

libfontconfig is needed for gnome/gtk related software.
I've read that the font mechanism in XFree86 itself is obsolete.
I also read that having fontconfig and freetype separate from
XFree86 has helped get bugs fixed faster and more new code.

Also, some main developers and contributors for XFree86 have left. I think
the freedesktop.org libX11 developer is the original XFree86 developer.

Two recent projects are doing X servers: x2 (at freedesktop.org) and
xouvert.

The arguments from the FreeBSD maintainer are:

- "will reduce the recompiling time for rebuilding things after an upgrade
 of a single part."

- "... expect the freedesktop.org libraries to stay better maintained and
release more frequently than XFree86's."

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/